The specification of this application relates to machine processing using machines such as computers to perform processing tasks such as machine translation.
Machines such as computers and computer-based machines are widely used to automate various processing tasks. Certain tasks that were difficult for machine to handle in the past are increasingly being automated due to advances in computer information technology and communication technology. Language translation and speech recognition are two examples of machine processing tasks that are being automated.
Translation from one human language or natural language (a source natural language) to another natural language (a target natural language) can be done in various ways. A person can manually translate a text in the source natural language (e.g., Chinese) by first reading and understanding the Chinese text and then writing down the corresponding text in the target language (e.g., English). Such manual translation tends to be of high quality but can be expensive and slow. Machine translation uses computers and other machines to automate part of or the entire translation process to reduce the translation cost and expedite the translation process. Rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation are two examples of machine translation techniques. A machine translation system can be easy to use: a user sends a digital document in the source natural language into the machine translation system; the system processes the document and produces a translated document in the target natural language. Machine translation is increasingly used in a wide range of applications. For example, resources are available on many computer networks such as the Internet to provide machine translation to allow for easy access to information in different natural languages.
The translation quality of machine translation systems, however, can be lower than manual translation and, sometimes, a machine-translated text can be difficult or impossible to understand. Various machine translation techniques including statistical machine translation techniques, have been developed to improve different aspects of machine translation, such as the translation quality and the translation speed.